[Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial

[Geoffrey Plourde]

Well where will it stop? If we have a project, we should have a memorial project for all disasters. I echo Mr. Bimmler in his concerns about the motives behind this proposal. 




________________________________
From: Fred Bauder <fredbaud at fairpoint.net>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List <foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 24, 2008 2:12:25 PM
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] New project proposal: Soviet Repressions Memorial

> 2008/12/24 Michael Bimmler <mbimmler at gmail.com>:
>
>> A project which is motivated in such a way cannot possibly be anything
>> else than biased...and indeed, the very concept of memorials is
>> biased: Why should we have a memorial of the victims of Soviet
>> Repression, when we don't have a memorial of Nazi victims, victims of
>> the Armenian Genocide, victim of the Rwandan Genocide, victims of
>> various repression regimes in South-East Asia and China, victims in
>> Darfur, Chad, the Central African Republic etc. etc.
>> No one can sensibly suggest that we can have memorial sites for every
>> "repression" (in lack of a better word) in history and thus, we had
>> better none, in my opinion.  (Yes, in other cases I argued and would
>> argue that it is better to have "something" than "nothing", but in
>> this case, I'm afraid I am not convinced of the merits of the proposal
>> at all and of the propriety of the motives behind it)
>
>
> Yes. However, it could be a valuable wiki to create privately. Generic
> hosting is (a) really cheap (b) often includes MediaWiki out the box.
> The wiki is unlikely to be vastly overloaded, so cheap hosting would
> do for a start.
>
> See http://www.sep11memories.org/wiki/In_Memoriam for a memorial
> project for victims of the World Trade Center attack, for example.
>
> Although started with a strong POV, such a project could nevertheless
> accumulate material of high quality historical and scholarly interest.
>
>
> - d.

I support this project, and don't think it should get pushed off into
some obscure corner of the internet. We should host it. We should host it
because we stand against totalitarian repression; and reject the position
that some knowledge, knowledge of the consequences of totalitarian
repression, is to be repressed and not readily available.

Fred Bauder



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